Media outlets access enhanced multi-platform content at no charge, with alerts when we have new content on issues or from regions you may select. Once we receive the filled out form below, you'll receive a message with the passcode/s. Welcome!

*These fields are required

*Media Outlet name

*Media Outlet City/State

Contact name

Contact phone

*Email address or fax #

*Media Outlet type

Additional (beyond the state you are located in) content that you would like to receive

Newscasts

PNS Daily Newscast - January 21, 2019

Could the nation’s airports be the next pressure points in the government shutdown? Also on our Monday rundown: Calls go out to improve food safety; and a new report renews calls for solutions to Detroit’s water woes.

Tribal Rights, Salmon Habitat Tested in Supreme Court Case

Poorly designed culverts can make it nearly impossible for salmon to swim upstream to spawn. (Jerilyn Walley/Flickr)

April 18, 2018

SEATTLE - The U.S. Supreme Court hears a case today with major implications for the rights of tribes and salmon in Washington state.

At the center of Washington v. United States are culverts, the pipes that carry streams under roads. The state has more than 800 culverts blocking more than 1,000 miles of streams. Twenty-one tribes sued the state 17 years ago to fix these culverts, which make salmon migration more difficult.

Professor Robert Anderson, who specializes in Native American law at the University of Washington Law School, said the lawsuit is based on a series of treaties that opened up the state to settlement.

"In exchange for surrendering their claims to most of their land in Western Washington," he said, "the tribes retained an explicit right to fish at usual and accustomed stations in their aboriginal territories."

The state has said it will cost $2 billion to fix the culverts, although Anderson countered there's no evidence for that number and it most likely represents the worst-case scenario.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson acknowledged that the state needs to do more to protect salmon, but said this case could force a costly solution that might not work.

Anderson said the state argued in a lower court that treaties don't offer protections for fish habitat, meaning tribe members have a right to fish, but the state doesn't have to guarantee there are any fish to catch. Washington has backed away from that argument in the Supreme Court case.

The verdict could have implications for other tribes, and for the habitat protections in treaties, although Anderson says these salmon-blocking culverts set a high bar.

"One thing I can say about this case," he said, "is that the harm is so clear that's being caused by these culverts that it's difficult to see how another case could match this level of hardship that the culverts are causing."

Still, he said, tribes in the West and Midwest are watching the case closely, because of its potential effects on their treaty rights to fish and hunt.